Post-Darwinist

This blog provides stories that Denyse O'Leary, a Toronto-based journalist, has found to be of interest, as she covers the growing intelligent design controversy. It supports her book By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg 2004). Does the universe - and do life forms - show evidence of intelligent design? If so, Carl Sagan was wrong and so is Richard Dawkins. Now what?

Sunday, March 01, 2009

My interview at Skeptiko

Honour killings - why we don't accept it here

At MercatorNet, my recent article: "The untimely death of Francesca Pompilia: A late seventeenth century case may mark a turning point in the West’s attitude to honour killings."

My youth wasn't entirely misspent, it seems, because I read a lot in college, and one of the things I read was a significant European case involving honour killing.

Honour killing has doubtless occurred often enough in Western Christian culture, as Robert Browning's poem, My Last Duchess attests. However, one centuries-old incident may shed some light on its gradual decline.

In 1698, an Italian death penalty case was appealed to Pope Innocent XII. We would hardly know of the case today except that in 1860, British poet Robert Browning found on a bookstall in Florence the legal briefs. He called his antiquarian find The Old Yellow Book. His later long poem on the subject, The Ring and the Book, spread the story through the English-speaking world.